User Interaction in version 9

[twrangham]

Just seeing if anyone has tested the new User Interaction tab of a policy in Casper 9? Testing this morning with an existing policy and a new policy to see if this could replace having to use an extra script with displayMessage or jamfHelper.

My policy simply ran a Update Inventory and this User Interaction message. Running from Self Service, I never see a popup message nor see anything in the logs for the policy for a message/popup.

Anyways, let me know if you have any ideas. Thanks!

[blinvisible]

I have a few policies using the "Complete Message" field. In Mountain Lion, it displays a Notification Center banner with the message I entered. I haven't tested what, if anything, happens if Notification Center is disabled (probably nothing), nor have I tested other OS versions.

[mm2270]

There are 2 styles of user interaction message and it depends on whether you want to allow the user to postpone a policy run.

With postpone settings set up, it uses jamfHelper in a hud style window that shows up in the upper right corner of the display, with no icon and whatever message you set up in the User interaction section of the policy. The window includes a drop down menu for delay choices in some standard increments but also a final one that is the longest postponement allowed, meaning, if you set a drop dead date for the policy to run of 09-17-2013 @ 12:30 AM and when it displays on the users screen it is 10:15 AM on the same day, the last item on the list of postpone options will say something like "2 hours, 15 minutes"

With no postpone set, if the client system is running Mountain Lion, it uses a new application called "Management Action.app" to display a message to the user in Notification Center. The app uses the Self Service icon and is located in the same location as jamfHelper on the client system in case you were wondering. You can have a message come up at the start of a policy run and then again when it completes, or one or the other. As far as I can tell, you can't customize the display of Management Action.app other than the core message. The title always shows up as Management Notification, and the app itself in Notification Center displays as Management Action. You can't specify a different icon form what I can see.

I haven't gotten around to testing how much text it can display, but in general, Notification Center messages tend to be limited in how much can be displayed, so I'll be curious to see if it flips to jamfHelper if you enter a long message, or if it handles this in a different way.

Anyway, I've tested both of these and they do work for me.

[blinvisible]

@mm2270 "I haven't gotten around to testing how much text it can display, but in general, Notification Center messages tend to be limited in how much can be displayed, so I'll be curious to see if it flips to jamfHelper if you enter a long message, or if it handles this in a different way."

It just truncates the displayed message with a "..." and you have to open Notification Center to view the full text.

[mm2270]

blimvisble wrote:

It just truncates the displayed message with a "..." and you have to open Notification Center to view the full text.

Nice :) Thanks for clarifying. I figured it was something like that, but would be nice it it handled that a bit more gracefully. Oh well.

[jguz]

User interaction features aren't working for self-service policies. An update to this would be much appreciated.

[Chris_Hafner]

I've only just gotten around to testing this and have noticed, that it simply doesn't seem to function in 9.21. No logs, nothing. Hopefully, I'm missing something very very simple.

[alan_trewartha]

The 9.0 administrator's guide…

Note: User Interaction messages and deferrals cannot be used with Self Service policies since users have control over when the policy starts.

Which is sort of sucky for acknowledgement and 'now do this' notifications.

Specifically I was making a self service FileVault policy - copying as per the video of the JNUC session! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySYs_z_DYiU

From about 50 mins you see setting up the policy… and then at about 55mins the user's view he gets a pop-up when the policy is done! :-(

[AKuzenkov]

Has anyone been able to find a workaround? I have a few policies which depend on running apps compiled from AppleScript and with JSS 9.x these policies are no longer functional.

[corbinmharris]

"User interaction features aren't working for self-service policies. An update to this would be much appreciated."

With our users, the more info we provide them, the better informed they are on what is going on with their Mac.

[jennifer]

Does anyone know if you can get the policy logs to show when a user has chosen the delay option?

[Chris_Hafner]

Should we be turning this into a "feature request"?

[wyip]

Specifically I was making a self service FileVault policy - copying as per the video of the JNUC session! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySYs_z_DYiU From about 50 mins you see setting up the policy… and then at about 55mins the user's view he gets a pop-up when the policy is done! :-(

@alan.trewartha - I worked around this by adding a script set to "After" that ran jamfHelper in my FileVault 2 self service policy. For some reason, this stopped working after I updated to 9.22, though. The script runs but the jamfHelper message never pops up. Anyone else seeing this behavior?

[AKuzenkov]

This issue seems to be resolved in 9.24. My compiled applescripts run fine now. The "no user interaction allowed" message doesn't show up anymore.